Long Knife

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Before leaving Vincennes for the Falls, George had instructed Montgomery to begin laying in provisions for another attempt on Detroit the following spring in the event that General Sullivan’s mission might fail. He simply could not give up the notion.

  “Never was a person more mortified than I was,” he wrote in his promised report to George Mason that fall from the new town of Louisville he was building at the Falls, “to lose so fair an opportunity to push a victory: Detroit lost for want of a few men!”

  While still reeling from the disappointment, George received a messenger one day from Vincennes. The man came in, gaunt and red-eyed, and took off his muskrat cap. He stood for several seconds, unable to speak. His eyes filled with tears.

  “Well, man, what is it? Are you dumbstruck?”

  “Hit pains me to bear this, Colonel, sir,” said the ranger, handing George a letter. “They say his lungs jes’ filled up from th’ powder burns or somethin’ like ’at. But Major Bowman ’as departed us, sir. So sorry, sir. Him such a young ’un ….”

  George gave a brief memorial oration that afternoon, remembering, as he spoke, how Joseph had looked leaving the room in shame over his brother’s wildcat raid; and wondering what would become of Mai-hah now. I hope, he thought, that Joseph lives on now in her loins. I’m sure he tried his best. That was just his way.

  That evening, in the privacy of his new quarters redolent with the tang of their fresh-hewn timbers, George wrote out Joe Bowman’s death certificate. Then he drank himself into oblivion.

  In their own rooms, many of the other veterans of the Illinois conquest did likewise.

  29

  ST. LOGIS, UPPER LOUISIANA TERRITORY

  September 5, 1779

  LADY MARIA DE LA CONCEPTIóN Y ZEZAR DE LEYBA WAS SIMPLY letting herself die, and her husband could only sit beside her bed helpless and desperate. Much of the time he sat there drunk because it was too painful and maddening and bewildering to try to understand it sober. The haze of drink softened the bony outlines of her face before him, and muffled the tread of minutes and hours, and enriched his exquisite emotions of grief.

  It was September fifth, and she had taken to her bed five days before. She had been sinking ever since. For nearly two days now she had said nothing to him.

  Her decline was easy to explain to the family and to well-wishers in the society of St. Louis, as she had been consumptive and malarial even before her arrival. But Fernando de Leyba knew that she was dying not from consumption or malaria but from melancholy and shame.

  Maria had endured this exile in the New World with Fernando only because she saw in her future a return to Old Spain with improved wealth and position. Now there was scarcely a hope of that left. By underwriting the credit of the Americans across the river, Fernando had finally lost his fortune, and fortunes of the Spanish traders he had influenced, and plunged into insurmountable debt.

  Maria had seemed to understand their plight before he did. She was not an optimist, and did not have the same faith in people and institutions that he had. He still believed that the governor of Virginia would send real coin to his friend Jorge Clark, or, if not, Governor Galvez in New Orleans would intercede.

  It seemed to Fernando de Leyba that everything would be all right if only Don Jorge would return to the Mississippi valley. Though matters had been difficult even when he was there, he had kept them under control. But since his departure to attack Detroit in June, his absence had been felt in serious ways.

  Teresa had gone into depression. She was listless, pining, reticent, given to great sighs and unexpected outbursts of weeping. She seemed to be estranged from Maria. Now and then she would make an effort to cheer the household with her wit or music, but could not sustain her own vivacity long enough to inspire anyone else. She spent much of her time in her room praying, and was beginning to act like a nun.

  Then there had been the Indian menace. After Don Jorge had led his army eastward out of the valley, bands of savages formerly allied with the British General Hamilton had become bold on both sides of the river. Two Kaskaskians had been killed and two others wounded by Indians. In the salt works at Ste. Genevieve two workers had been killed, and four men in a pirogue going from St. Louis to Ste. Genevieve had been ambushed from shore, murdered, and scalped. Many other alarms had occurred around the villages and in the fields. De Leyba was painfully aware of his limitations as defender of the Spanish honor in the region.

  And since the small American detachment had returned to Kaskaskia from Vincennes without Don Jorge Clark, their relations with the French and the Spaniards had deteriorated. Don Juan Todd, the new civil governor of Illinois County, was a fine man, but seemed unable to deal diplomatically with the inhabitants. And Lieutenant Colonel Montgomery sometimes exhibited an abrasiveness, a certain arrogance, in his dealings with the Kaskaskians.

  But all that was minor compared with the matter of currency and credit. Until lately, Spanish traders and boatmen through Señor Pollock of New Orleans had been able to redeem silver, dollar for dollar, for continental paper money they received for military stores sold to the Americans; thus the paper money had depreciated less quickly in the Mississippi valley than in the East. This had attracted American traders who came with large quantities of depreciated currency and unloaded it to buy pelts and skins. Gradually then the inhabitants had lost faith in the American paper currency, which made it ever more difficult for the American officers there to purchase supplies for their troops. The inhabitants did not want to yield up their goods even for receipts endorsed by the esteemed Colonel Clark, and so de Leyba, Vigo, and others who continued to honor the American credit became more and more overextended.

  It was when Maria had questioned her husband about his gloom and immoderate drinking that he had revealed their plight; she had immediately thereupon taken to her bed with the weight of her mortification.

  Fernando de Leyba leaned forward in his chair now to stroke Maria’s ashen brow. Absently, he murmured, “Our friend Don Jorge will come from the Ohio to visit us one day soon. He will frighten the Indians away. He will make arrangements against the debts. He will make Teresa smile, and then thou, querida mía, can get up from this bed and be happy as before!” He leaned close and kissed her lips. For the first time in hours, she opened her heavy eyelids. She moved her lips to speak; they stuck dryly to her teeth. “Borracho!” she said, above a whisper. “You reek of wine.”

  “No matter. Maria, you hear me, don’t you?” A smile was beginning to spread on his face; he imagined her past the crisis now. “Don Jorge will come to us and arrange everything, I said!”

  She shut her eyes again; turned her face away. “Never say that name!” she hissed. “Esta maldición …”

  He recoiled as if slapped. “Maria! I will not permit …”

  “Estupido! He has ruined us. He has … despoiled the virtue of thy sister, man! Go away, ’Nando. I am ready for the priest … Is the priest … Is the priest here? … Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us now and in the hour …”

  She fell silent again and more limp still, sagging further into the great pillows, eyes shut, lids trembling, and Fernando lurched to his feet, stunned by what she had said and already casting out of his mind the veracity of it. God forgive her, he thought; she is crazy …

  He staggered down the corridor, bumping his shoulder on the wall and knocking down an iron sconce as he went to Teresa’s door. He thrust it open. She was kneeling, muttering prayers as always, not even noticing his presence, transcendent, eyes radiant, virginal, and innocent, fixed on the crucifix. He backed out of the room and stumbled on the stairs, descending unsteadily to his office. Lies, he thought. Maria lies. Not dying. Shaming me … for her disappointments. Doesn’t need a priest … not even sick …

  From a nearby room beyond a door came the reedy voices of the children, reciting with their tutor. De Leyba entered his study, glanced out at the early-coloring leaves, staggered to the sofa, and decanted brandy. To Don Jorge our friend and
benefactor, he thought as he drained it. He will come and visit us from the Falls of the Ohio and repair all this nonsense. It is nothing, nothing. Nada en absoluto. Teresa is virgen.

  He passed out eventually, without having another thought about summoning Father Gibault; and while he sprawled snoring and drooling on the sofa, Maria in their great bed upstairs quit living, without benefit of absolution.

  BY OCTOBER THE VALUE OF AMERICAN CURRENCY WAS SLIDING downward so rapidly that John Todd wrote bills of exchange to a Spanish trader amounting to forty thousand pesos for twenty thousand pounds of hides and skins worth in reality about three thousand pesos, for the reason that he could always trade skins for provisions. The peltries were, in effect, a more stable currency than the American paper money, and became the “fund” by which the garrison could be kept in provisions for a while longer.

  The trader, under persuasion from Fernando de Leyba, accepted the American notes for the skins though no one was by this time wanting to accept American paper. But because of the enormous discrepancy between the recent and earlier bills of exchange, de Leyba was afraid the matter might discredit the earlier bills, and so sat down on the eighteenth of October to write a letter which would advise Governor Galvez of the problem. It meant, of course, revealing his own involvement in trying to prop up the Americans’ credit.

  Looking sickly and ten years older than he had a few months before, feeling that he was at the very end of his rope, Fernando de Leyba sat drinking and writing, occasionally having to stop to wipe his tears and compose his thoughts.

  My Dear sir and Protector—

  The letters I sent your Lordship from the General of Virginia and Governor Clark will serve, I believe, as authentic documents to prove clearly to your Lordship my scrupulousness in the handling of this affair. I assure your Lordship with all respect that by courtesy alone I should not have been able to accomplish so much. It was my good works which forced them to live in harmony with the Spanish government of this side, but, my Governor, how dearly this little bit of idle splendor has cost me. My family weeps and I share with them in their just regret.

  My undermined health does not promise me many years of life and, when this is ended, my poor daughters have no other resources to save them from beggary than the property that my hardships may have secured for them. By your Lordship’s favor and protection I had well-founded hopes of freeing them from so bitter a potion, but the coming of the Americans to this district has ruined me utterly.

  He had to stop; he was strangling on remorse. In his mind’s eye he saw the face of his friend Don Jorge Clark, still his most beloved friend despite this catastrophe.

  … Several inhabitants of this town, who put their property in the hands of these Americans to please me, find themselves in the same situation, and these losses are equally a matter of regret to me with my own since I consider myself the immediate cause of them. But what was there for me to do with your Lordship’s orders except to come to their aid in view of the fact that even the principal leader, however many American documents he brought, had not a shirt to cover his nakedness. I accomplished this on my credit with all the inhabitants so that they might provide these Americans with whatever they needed.

  This measure relieved them of their affliction and I was left as hostage, since I became bondsman for ten thousand pesos (as is clear from the receipts that I have in various places in this post, which must be paid). On their part I was paid by two bills of exchange which Francisco Vigo has taken to New Orleans, and they have not been paid …. I acted in this way, my Governor, thinking to do a service for your Lordship and please you. The result of this is that I am now overwhelmed with trouble not only for what I owe and cannot pay, but also by the chance that your Lordship may not approve my measures (this is what tortures me most) although all were intended to show you my blind obedience.

  These inhabitants did not want to give up their goods even for Colonel Clark’s receipts. They gave them immediately when I pledged mine. If I lose my credit by not being able to pay them, the service may be retarded as a consequence since it is certain that, if I need some unexpected aid for my troops, I shall not get it.

  Finally, my Governor, my beloved wife, who came to this exile with so many hardships only to bring it about that at the end of it we should return to Spain, when she saw her hopes frustrated by the labyrinth of debts in which she found me involved, was overcome by such a great melancholy that after only five days of illness in bed, she passed from this to another life, without my repeated urgings that we could trust to your Lordship’s favor being able to relieve her, that your Lordship, intervening, would not fail to look upon our cause with pity, but nothing was sufficient because the unexpected blow had been too much of a shock. Her loss makes me look upon that of my property as an affair of little importance. Therefore, in company with my weeping little daughters, I implore your Lordship’s protection for the collection of these bills of exchange. I do not doubt that your chivalrous heart will grant it to me, at least out of pity for these innocent little girls, even though it be necessary to appeal to the court, inasmuch as whatever I have done has been purely an act of hospitality, fitting between any nations.

  Your hand is kissed, your Lordship, by your most devoted and humble servant,

  FERNdo DE LEYBA

  Outside his window, a bitter wind was ripping leaves off the willows and maples and blowing them over the mansion grounds, bright flashes of yellow against a ragged, gusty, iron-gray sky. The leaves drifted up at the foot of the garden hedges and walls. Hard freezes had struck several times already, and a severe, comfortless winter seemed to hang like a grim and unmistakable threat in the offing. Fernando rose, heavy with regret and foreboding, and went toward the sitting room by the pantry, where the children’s voices piped and whined through their lessons. The tutor had gone, and Teresa now sat on a straight chair before their divan, hearing their recitations. The children looked unwell, their eyes ravaged by sleeplessness and misery, their noses red from the chill in the house. Teresa was dressed in black simplicity, only a white collar showing, her thick hair drawn back as severely as Maria’s had used to be. A child’s face setting off the garb of a nun or matron, he thought; but with a strange, wise, serene sort of beauty about it now. After Maria’s death she had emerged from her vacuity and her religious distraction back into reality, and was trying as well as she knew how to be a surrogate mother to her nieces.

  The first day Fernando had seen her with them after Maria’s death, he had swelled up with a wave of shame and anger, thinking for a moment that one who had thrown her virtue away was not fit to look after his daughters; he had thought for a moment of forbidding her to spend time privately with them.

  But immediately his censure had been swept away by a warm rush of compassion.

  Her only sin, he thought, was to give everything she had—even her honor—to the noblest and dearest man she had ever known.

  And that, after all, he thought now as he looked at his sister, was in a way no more than he himself had done.

  30

  LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY

  September 1779

  EARLY IN THE FALL OF 1779, COLONEL DAVID ROGERS, ONE OF George’s cousins, brought a large boat up the Ohio to the Falls, carrying a valuable cargo of clothing, flour, and ammunition obtained from the Spanish at New Orleans and destined for the defenders at Fort Pitt. He had somehow managed to slip past the British posts at Manchac and Natchez on the Mississippi. George provided him with an escort of twenty-three veterans of the Illinois campaign to help ensure his passage the rest of the way up the Ohio. At the head of this detachment was Lieutenant Abraham Chapline. George went to the river one September morning and bade these old comrades goodbye, and watched the convoy go up the river.

  In October one of the boats returned, its squad of men heavy with despair. On the fourth, they reported, Colonel Rogers and his party, numbering sixty men, had fallen into an ambush above the mouth of the Licking River. Over a hundred and th
irty Indians led by the renegade Girty brothers had killed most of the party, taken the supplies, and captured Lieutenant Chapline and a few others. Colonel Rogers had died of wounds soon after the battle. Only this one boatload of men had escaped. For days thereafter, George was benumbed by grief for the loss of so many of his beloved heroes, and by the futility of Rogers’ brilliant odyssey.

  In November, nine months after capturing Henry Hamilton, George sent his conductor-general William Shannon to Williamsburg with a precious cargo of papers for the state auditor of Virginia: All his original vouchers, the twenty thousand papers of receipt and disbursement covering the entire Illinois campaign, that great and worrisome burden of meticulous records he had carried from one place to another. Here at last would be the settling of his public accounts and the clearance of all those innumerable liabilities to which he had signed his own name. The letter of passage told Shannon to wait on Governor Jefferson, then return to Louisville as quickly as possible with the auditor’s receipt. George watched Shannon and his escort ride off through the snow, and felt as if a boulder had been lifted from his shoulders.

  The winter of 1779–1780 was to be remembered for many years as “the hard winter.” Snow did not melt for three months; streams froze to the bottom. Most of the settlers’ cattle died, and innumerable buffalo, deer, wild turkeys, and other animals perished. Hunters were reduced to digging frozen animal carcasses out of the snow. People thawed the frozen meat of their dead horses. The price of corn quadrupled everywhere on the frontier. The typical meal for a Kentucky family was a fistful of hard johnnycake. John Sanders, released from military service, had gone into business with a group of hunters to serve as procurers of meat for the settlement and its garrison, but that winter they did precious little business. Many families starved to death trapped in their remote cabins, and many of the survivors suffered frostbite. The steel of axes and splitting wedges grew so brittle in the cold that they broke on striking. Trees split at night under the brilliant cold stars with cracks like rifle shots. The new settlement of Louisville at the Falls of the Ohio went on hard rations under George’s orders, as nothing could be brought down the frozen Ohio, and messages between the winter-locked outposts almost stopped.